360 Degree Presentations #4: It’s Not Real Until You Launch
Launch that puppy. Launch it right now.
Eventually, any product or service needs to launch, or be turned on, or made available, or something, or it’s just an idea. Having opened his 360 Degree Marketing Presentation by hitting all the right introductory points, Kim Gjerstad had to get to the meat of the presentation: what was it actually like to roll out MailPoet, and what had to happen to make it “the right time” to launch?
There is no right time. Product or presentation, once you’ve laid the ground work, you launch into the real business at hand.
This is especially true with software, because software by nature is never “finished”, unless it’s reached end-of-life and is really finished. So with culture in place — or at least building — and a team ready to get WYSIJA/MailPoet rolling, it was time to run down the checklist one more time and get MailPoet out there.
Because it’s a WordPress Plug-in, Gjerstad and the MailPoet team made the obvious — if you understand the WordPress ecosystem — choice to launch their baby into WordPress’ software repository:
This really is the move for anyone looking to make money using WordPress as a springboard; whether you make themes, widgets, or full-blown, high-functioning plug-ins like MailPoet, the WordPress repository is the single best (and free!) place to get buzz and move toward critical mass and your minimum viable product. Your job building the pre-launch checklist and defining business process is to know things like that about the markets you operate in. Kim Gjerstad and the MailPoet team understood, and MailPoet was launched.
We’ll talk about statistics moving forward, and Kim revealed an amazing amount of statistical data covering MailPoet’s experience in his speech. Until we get there, though, here are a few important points to understand if you’d like to be the next MailPoet:
- You want into the WordPress repository
- WordPress has rules about what can go there
- Rule #1 is that anything you put in the WordPress repository has to be free
- There are ways around rule #1, Kim Gjerstad is a bit of an expert, and with the correct business processes, you can be, too
Mull that over; I’ll be back with more. In the meantime, if you want to start looking at your business processes and figuring out how the MailPoet experience applies to your business, I’m right here.
